3.3% of PCs with ESET antivirus block a threat each day

ESET's research team has released some interesting new finding based on recent …

ESET is known as the creator of one of the better security software solutions, and recently the organization has done more research into what its customers are seeing. The company's virus lab receives over 100,000 new pieces of malware every day. The big conclusion? There are more malware authors than ever and their technologies to rapidly create new variants of malicious code are getting better.

While you stifle your yawn (since you're not really surprised), here's a statistic ESET discovered that you probably couldn't have come up with yourself: 3.3 percent of the computers running ESET's antivirus detect and block at least one threat every day. The calculation was made using the company's ThreatSense.Net monitoring system, which gathers statistics on malicious activity on customer computers running ESET software.

That number means that for every 1,000 computers connected to the Internet, 33 of them will encounter some sort of malware during the next 24 hours. As ESET notes, that's a scary percentage for a company with 1,000s of computers, but for the rest of us, the truth is probably a relief. Be honest now. Would you have guessed that less than one out of 20 computers encounter malware each day? Then again, these are threats detected solely by ESET's software, so it's completely possible that it's more than 3.3 percent, but it's unlikley to be significantly higher than that.

During the last three months, more than half a million PCs have been scanned using the ESET Online Scanner, which can be used by anyone with a PC, regardless of what security software (if any) they have installed. The ESET research team has compiled and analyzed this recent data from the tool, and has come to two conclusions:

When a computer is infected, an average of 13 malicious files are found on the system (a piece of malware can corrupt or infect more than one file)

On average, there are three malware families found on infected computers (malware can propagate itself across a network or download other types of malware)

Security companies love to come up with conclusions that make the computer industry look like it's in terrible shape, because their business relies on it being in such a state. For example, the two statistics above can only be taken into consideration while remembering that the more malware a computer has, the more likely it is that the user will make the decision to scan it with an online tool. Still, data like this is worth discussing, as long as you remember what the source is and that it isn't necessarily representative of the whole market.